The Claws of the N'longu, Ch. 2
The Bird and the Wildmen
A deep furrow was rent into the jungle by the thing that fell from the sky, and both Blackpaw and White-eye stared out at the aftermath in wide-eyed astonishment. When they made their way through the path of trampled undergrowth and toppled trees left by the stampede, both were surprised to see how quickly that path ended. A short sprint through the smoky haze was all it took. As before, they made the sprint on three limbs, crouching low so they could see better through the smoke. Orange embers floated within the haze and even before they broke through they could already see spots that glowed from fire. In all, they ran for no more than two minutes before they broke through the haze and were met with an unobstructed blue sky.
Blackpaw stood upright. He’d walked into the middle of the scar the massive thing had torn into the soil. Rock, dirt, and root alike had been torn up and shoved aside, turning the land inside out. The depth of the furrow was almost equal to his shoulder. That wasn’t entirely surprising in itself now that he could see just how massive this thing was. It lay leaning on its side, its body jaggedly split in two down the middle. Most of its fires had gone out, leaving spots of smoldering black char along its mostly flat top, and the fires that hadn't been extinguished burned low. The dark blue color of the thing reminded Blackpaw of the large beetles that liked to buzz around eating overripe fruit in the hot season, but it lacked the multicolored shine they had in the sunlight. Its body seemed alike to their shells in its apparent brittleness, too. Instead of being ripped and split in loose and fleshy gashes the way most beasts would be, the behemoth had cracked and splintered into little shards similar to how the shells of bugs were when Blackpaw’s tribe ground them for pigments.
This was so much larger than any bug he could imagine, though! Despite being cracked and splintered and split in two, with parts of the behemoth’s shell scattered about with the remains of the trees it destroyed when it crashed, it was still almost as tall as the trees surrounding it. Of course, that only further raised the question of how something this big could fly in the first place! Even the largest of the terror soarers would be utterly dwarfed by the smoldering behemoth, made to look as flies against its sheer bulk! Stranger still, though it somewhat resembled the smoothly domed shape of a beetle’s shell, there was no meat to be seen on the inside. Beetles always had meat on the inside, that soft and squishy white kind that squirted in the mouth when it was chewed. Bizarre!
White-eye, back from stashing their bristleback kill somewhere, rapped his shoulder with a loosely closed fist, then handed something to Blackpaw when he turned to face his cyclopean visage. It was a large chunk of the thing’s shell, one of the dull blue parts. White-eye had one in his other hand, too. With a nod, Blackpaw tucked his spear in the crook of his arm and took it. It was lighter than he expected. Wide on one side and skinny on the other, the shell chunk was long and flat and only blue on one side. The other was a grayish tan and had darker ripples of brown running through it. Blackpaw brought it to his nose and sniffed deep, then dragged a hand over the surface of it. It was mostly smooth, but it had both a familiar roughness and scent to it. Could it be?
Blackpaw hurried over to one of the felled trees and picked up a long chunk of the splintered wood. He sniffed and rubbed it between his fingers, then did the same with the haft of his spear. It was wood! Facing his brother, he shook the broken plank excitedly in one hand, then knocked it against the nearby stump left behind by a tree that, until just a few minutes ago, had been standing tall and proud for who knew how many years.
White-eye nodded, then pointed down to other parts from the broken titan of wood. The shiny parts. They came in various sizes and shapes. Some were small and sharp and twisted up. Others looked like bent spear shafts, but they were hard like rock and strangely smooth and when Blackpaw lifted one up to his eye he found he could look through it. Others still were thin and flexible, and there were tiny pieces of shapes he didn’t recognize that were stuck in some of the wood. It was all very strange.
Slowly, they picked their way closer to the fallen thing, this giant bug that wasn’t a bug, and as they did they started to recognize the mangled shapes of bodies among the wreckage. However, they weren’t mostly the bodies of beasts as they’d hoped. There was one animal among them that they recognized, a young swoop horn with flesh of green and red. These things tended to live near to water. Favoring the soft plants that grew in rivers and lakes, they’d root them up with their bill-like mouths and languidly chew away from the relative safety of the water. Their heads were also topped with a single horn that swooped backwards over their necks, though where other beasts like frilled big-horns sported a forward facing pair that ended in sharp points, the singular horns of a swoop horn ended in a rounded nub, with the males sporting longer and brighter horns than females.
Unfortunately, this young male’s body was far too mangled to get any decent meat off of it, a fact that made White-eye grumble with displeasure. Blackpaw ignored him, though. He was far more interested in the other bodies that lay scattered and twisted among the ruins. He squatted down next to an arm that jutted out from a large chunk of the shiny shell. The piece kind of looked like part of a tree trunk in that it was round and long and had what looked like two branches jutting out of the top of it, but like the spear shafts it was hollow inside. Pulling at the stiff arm, he realized that it ended in a five fingered hand not unlike his own, albeit both the arm and the hand were smaller and skinnier than himself. Curious to see more, he placed both hands firm against the shiny hollow tree thing and shoved, rolling it off the corpse.
It was male, like him. He recognized similar hair on its face to White-eye, though it wasn’t so bushy. Its ribs and one of its legs had been crushed by the thing Blackpaw pushed off it, but even then he was amazed at how much it looked like a strange and diminutive version of himself. The hair was shorter and lighter, the skin was paler, and its body wasn’t nearly so well muscled, but the strange man still looked like he could’ve belonged to one of the jungle tribes. The most unusual thing about him, apart from his unusually small size, were his garments. Instead of animal hide tied about the waist as he and White-eye had, this one wore some sort of rough blue thing that wrapped around both of its legs. It also had a darker blue thing wrapped around its chest and arms, with a white thing underneath that. All of these were torn and stained with the strange man’s blood, but the dark blue thing on his outside was fascinating for all the shiny things embedded in it! Three of them were placed equal distances apart under his chest, and they shone yellow. Two much larger ones, each with multiple dangling braids that looked like hair, sat on his shoulders. The hard parts of that were a bright and shiny gray, while the braids were yellow like the little stones that sat over his belly.
Blackpaw started to pull the thing off the body when he heard his brother call to him. Peeking up, he saw White-eye standing next to the broken body of the behemoth. He was staring up at something, another shiny part of the wooden shell that had shapes carved into it. Leaving the corpse behind, he stepped over to his brother’s side to study those strange shapes.
B L U E - J A Y
Blackpaw narrowed his eyes and tilted his head. He’d never seen shapes like that before. Holding his spear out, he scraped the stone head of it against the length of shiny material. It left scratches in the surface and skipped when it caught on the indented lines of the strange shapes. He thought of reaching up to pry the thing away, maybe wrenching it off the behemoth’s wooden shell with his spear, but an unexpected cry caught both brothers by surprise.
“Captain!” went the high pitched shout, and both brothers wheeled to face it with spears at the ready.
Blackpaw blinked, his head tilted and jaw slightly agape. It was one of those smaller people, a female by the shape of her. She was wearing a garment just as strange as the one on that corpse he found, though it seemed a little more alike to the hide wrapped around his waist in some ways. White and pink in color, the white part of the garment hung long and loose at the waist, covering the entire length of her legs. From the waist up the garment was pink and frilly, like it was lined with blossom petals. It also made her waist look thin and her bosom heave, drawing an excited stare from the primitive man.
“Beastmen, Captain! Come quickly!” she shouted, gesticulating at something Blackpaw couldn’t see. Whatever it was didn’t matter to him. He was too taken by the appearance of the small but beautiful woman to care. She stood about a head-and-a-half shorter than he did and though her unusual garments were stained and torn in places, they still accentuated her alluring figure. Yellow hair, shiny like the strange stones on that corpse’s garment, framed her soft and pretty features and the wide blue eyes she stared at them with sparkled like the lakes in the northern jungle. Her skin was pale, too, but pink with vibrancy unlike the dead pallor of the corpse he found. Either way, their light skin seemed odd compared to the dark olive tone that he and his brother sported.
A moment later, another one stepped out. This one was a little bit taller, though still easily a head shorter than himself, and male. Like the woman he, too, had blue eyes, but unlike any of them his hair was short and brown and swept off to one side. His garments were similar to the one Blackpaw found earlier - a pair of light blue wrappings at the legs, a dark blue one at the chest and arms, and black coverings for his feet. The stones and braids at his stomach and shoulders glittered as he moved but it was the little club of that hard, shiny material that he held in his hands which truly caught Blackpaw’s eye.
“Heavens be!” the small man blurted, and he started fumbling with that club.
Grunting, he tapped White-eye in the chest with the back of his fist and pointed to the strange club with his spear. It had a shaft of dark gray set upon a length of smooth reddish wood that was lined with more of that shiny yellow rock. The man tilted the club so the metal shaft pointed up at him, then pulled out what looked like a packet made from a white leaf and shoved it inside. Blackpaw glanced at his brother and tilted his head, but White-eye only shrugged. Neither one of them knew why the small man was playing with his club like that.
They resumed watching with curiosity. The small man had pulled a skinny stick of the same dark gray material out of the club and plunged the fat end of it inside the hollow part over and over. Then he swiftly shoved it back into place, fiddled around with some curving thing on the side, then pulled that same curving thing back until it clicked and pointed the dark gray hollow of the club at them.
“Stay behind me, Carolyne,” he said. The woman nodded rapidly and scurried behind him. Then the man started to yell. “Now you two go back where you came from! I’m warning you, I won’t hesitate to shoot!”
The brothers looked at each other again. They could tell the man was trying to tell them something, but the sounds he made were strange and nonsensical. As they grunted back and forth to each other, the little man pointed his club at each of them. A moment later, White-eye rolled his still good eye and shrugged, then stood aside as Blackpaw tucked his spear under his arm and started walking toward them.
“Stay back!” the small man cried. Both he and the woman scrambled three steps backwards. That brought Blackpaw a moment of pause.
“Oora. Fah rah oora,” he grunted, and he gently beat his fist once against his chest. Then he started walking toward them again.
Blackpaw yelped as fire and thunder spat from the small man’s club! He jumped back, eyes wide and teeth bared and spear tightly gripped in both hands as he pointed it at the man! However, before he could act, White-eye roared! Looking back, he saw a wound had been ripped open on White-eye’s flank. Bleeding and furious, the hairy titan of a primal man rushed toward the little people in their strange garments as the small man frantically tried to stuff his thunder club with another white leaf!
Thank you all for reading the chapter 2 of The Claws of the N’longu, my entry for a writing challenged posed by
to write a 10,000-20,000 word Howardian pulp adventure as part of our weekly Sword and Saturday pulp fantasy share-fest. If you’d like to participate, the final submission date is Saturday, Feb. 17th and specific details are available in the linked post.Chapter Word Count: 2,317
Total Word Count: 4,070
I’m getting a kind of steampunk vibe with the wooden parts of the ship, and the gun, very nice!
This has been really cool to catch up on and read! Thanks for inviting me to the Sword & Saturdays!
I really like seeing someone adding dinosaurs to S&S, really something the genre (or any genre really) has been lacking!